It is incredible stupid not to mention anachronistic to claim that any sort of analysis of privilege can be made along a single axis with the exception perhaps of class privilege.

Class privilege may well trump all other form of privilege.

I get really furious when some twit, who was privileged from birth with every educational opportunity possible, tutors, trips to Europe, and every lesson imaginable tries to tell me I had male privilege.

I was an obvious transkid. The bullying started before I entered kindergarten.

I grew up in mill and mining towns and went to schools that reflected the economic realities of those impoverished communities.

Therefore when someone who went to private schools capped with a degree from one of the Ivies tries to pull the privilege put down out on me I take it with a strong dose of skepticism

Now let us suppose that being TS/TG wasn’t an exceptional burden for any child to grow up with.

That would presuppose the transkid wasn’t obvious, that it wasn’t written on their body and they didn’t have their education destroyed by bullying.

While this wasn’t my experience enough sisters have gone through the military for me to think this is possible.

We all have one thing in common. At some point in our lives we come out and transition.

Considering how T to F transsexual and transgender people have to fight to be considered part of the human race, much less women is it really reasonable to smack us around with the male privilege slur?

Further this gets used in a gender policing manner that requires us to adhere to some of the strictest gender guidelines this side of some of the fundie religious cults.

If our status as female goes unquestioned then we are free to be loose in our embrace of gender without taking a bunch of shit. Unless we out ourselves to people we think are our friends with in the lesbian/feminist world.

Then our doing anything is seen as residual male privilege. Even if we learned the skill long after transitioning and had to put up with all sorts of sexist bull shit to learn it.

I feel sorry for those sisters who aren’t able to blend in. What sort of male privilege is there to being obviously TS/TG? To being unable to get a job or walk down the street without being taunted?

But there is a real test, one that is pretty much a fail by anyone’s standards.

How many cis-gender women would be willing to wear the label of transwoman?

One would think that all sorts of cis-gender women would embrace the label in exchange for all the privilege transwomen are supposed to have.

But I be willing to bet damned few would risk coming out to their friends as being a transwoman, even as part of a psych experiment to record their friend’s reactions.

Most of those who hurl this slur are simply being hateful and displaying their own norm-born cis-privilege. They know full well that TS/TG people go through life taking shit cis-gender folks would be appalled at were it to happen to them.

The real kicker is we are just supposed to suck it up and absorb the bullshit, just like we did when we were transkids.

“Any evangelical leader — by which I mean someone like a minister or an elder — who voted for Obama the second time, is not qualified for the office he holds, and should resign that office,” Wilson wrote in an Oct. 14 blog post. “Unless and until he repents of how he is thinking about the challenges confronting our nation, he should not be entrusted with the care of souls.”

Wilson, who’s known for his books on Christian theology and his debates on religion with the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, suggested there may be other reasons why supporting Obama could disqualify church leaders, but he said he’d focused primarily on the president’s “radical pro-abort position.”

Drawing a link between Margaret Sanger, the Planned Parenthood founder, and the then-respectable eugenics movement she aligned herself with to promote contraception use in the early 20th Century, Wilson singled out black officials who supported Obama as particularly ill-suited to lead congregations.

“Not only must the dignity of human life be upheld by white and black Christian leaders alike, to the extent we may allow any differences, it should be to expect a greater vehemence in opposing abortion (in the person of its advocates and enablers) from black leaders,” Wilson wrote. “This is because it is their people who are being disproportionately targeted by the white Sangerites. And a black Christian leader who cannot identify a Sangerite is a rabbit leader who does not know what a hawk looks like.”

It’s not just about abortion — the right is locking up women when it deems them a threat to their fetuses

It is no secret that this has been a banner year for laws attempting to recriminalize abortion. During the first six months of 2013, states adopted 43 provisions to ban abortion, impose medically unnecessary restrictions on providers or otherwise regulate the procedure into nonexistence.

But framing the current assault on reproductive rights exclusively in terms of abortion rights erases another, equally dangerous reality faced by women who intend to carry their pregnancies to term: laws that establish personhood for fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses aren’t just a threat to women’s access to abortion — they are also being used to criminalize and incarcerate pregnant women.

“The arguments being used to support the recriminalization of abortion not only have implications for the reproductive rights of women who want to continue their pregnancy to term,” Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, told Salon. “The impact will be — the impact has already been — to deny pregnant women their very personhood. What’s at stake is not just reproductive rights, but virtually every right we associate with constitutional personhood.”

The available data on punitive state actions against pregnant women more than bears this out.

According to research compiled by NAPW, between 1973 and 2005, there have been 413 documented cases in which a woman’s pregnancy was a necessary factor in criminal charges brought against her by the state. In these cases and the 200 others that have been documented since 2005, women have been deprived of due process, the right to legal counsel, freedom of movement and other basic constitutional protections simply because they were pregnant.

In September, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the first part of its review of the latest climate science, the AR5 report. What makes the IPCC unique is that it is not the voice of a single scientist, or even that of a group. It represents a combined view of in this case 209 lead authors and a further 600 contributing authors. That is 809 scientists from all around the world, calmly setting out the data as they observe it. They observe that since the 1950s, many of the changes to our climate are unprecedented over the previous decades and in some cases millennia. They observe that the atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. They observe that each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983-2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years. Just after the report came out many business leaders urged immediate action from governments, businesses and society to reduce carbon emissions and increase resilience. They were right to do so.

Climate change is sometimes misunderstood as being about changes in the weather. In reality it is about changes in our very way of life. Climatic shifts on the scale suggested by our current emissions trajectory could wreak havoc with the global agricultural system. 2 degrees of average warming could still mean several times that in the world’s temperate regions, where much of the world’s food is grown. Changing patterns of rainfall could increase the volatility of global crop yields as more countries experience doubts and floods that can wipe out whole harvests in the blink of an eye. All this during a period in which we expect the world to welcome an additional 2 billion people. The arithmetic doesn’t add up. The gains in prosperity that many in the world have enjoyed over the past century of growth and industrialization could be severely curtailed if we do not change path urgently towards a more sustainable future. That is to say nothing of the more devastating effects of rising sea levels on the millions of people who live in low lying coastal regions and the prospect of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees that may be created if we do not act now.

Governments’ ambitions to limit warming to 2°C now appear increasingly more difficult: in 2012 PWC estimated that the required improvement in global carbon intensity to meet a 2°C warming target had risen to 5.1% a year from now to 2050 – a rate of decarbonization not achieved since World War Two. But every year of delay will increase emissions, lock the economy into a high carbon future and make future emissions reductions more costly. The world must therefore act in a swift and coordinated way to avoid the more pessimistic scenarios of 4°C or even 6 °C average warming above pre industrial levels.

But faced with all this we have no choice but to be optimistic. It is often when most challenged that the human species can surprise us most. As we head towards the UN climate negotiations (UNFCCC COP19) that kick off on 11 November in Warsaw we have to focus on three things; Understating what is possible, showing what is possible and doing what is possible.

Growing demand amid unstable temperatures is creating a deficit, a new report warns

Morgan Stanley Research has successfully alighted on a way to throw the Internet into a panic: A report released Monday by the firm cautions that we may be on the precipice of a global wine shortage.

2.8 billion cases of wine per year may not be enough to keep the world happily buzzed on antioxidants, according to the analysis, which found that heavy drinking combined with a 5 percent fall in global production has left us 300 million cases shy of the amount needed to meet demand.

Last year’s drop in production can be partly attributed to unstable weather in Argentina and Western Europe. A combination of weather damage and disease, for example, contributed to a fall in France’s stocks of wine to their lowest level in over a decade.

And as climate change worsens, we could be seeing more of this sort of thing. A study from earlier this year warned that traditional wine country regions — including the Bordeaux and Rhone regions in France, Tuscany in Italy and Napa Valley in California and Chile – will experience sharp declines in production by 2050. Writing for LiveScience, wine expert and University of Maryland researcher Antonio Busalacchi explained his own findings that “extreme events, such as heat waves that shut down photosynthesis and hail storms that can ruin a chateau’s annual production in a matter of minutes, will become more commonplace.” Aside from lowered stocks, he said, wines will also lose their traditional character.